Enclosure, Knockkelly, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Knockkelly, Co. Tipperary

At Knockkelly in County Tipperary, a circular enclosure has effectively ceased to exist as a physical structure, yet it refuses to disappear entirely.

Ploughed flat since the 1970s, it now survives almost entirely as a cropmark, a phenomenon in which the buried remains of an ancient fosse, or defensive ditch, cause the grass above it to grow more densely than the surrounding field. That difference in growth rate, modest and easy to miss at ground level, is what keeps this site legible to those who know how to look.

The enclosure measures roughly 32 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west internally, and the fosse surrounding it is markedly uneven in width, running to 4.4 metres on the east side and widening to 6.5 metres on the north. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a circular enclosure with a wide surrounding ditch and even noted a small internal feature, now also discernible only through that same subtle variation in grass growth, measuring approximately 12 by 11 metres. An aerial photograph taken in 1969, before the ploughing began in earnest, shows the fosse still clearly visible from above. At some earlier point a field boundary running north to south had cut across the eastern quadrant of the monument, though that boundary has itself since been removed, leaving the site with a layered history of erasure. A second enclosure sits around 50 metres to the north-north-west, suggesting this was once a more complex landscape than the current tillage fields suggest.

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Pete F
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